If you have ever used google Analytics for your website you may have come across an annoying quirk that hides the full referring URL when viewing “Traffic Sources”. Only the domain itself is shown which becomes an issue if you are trying to track down visitors being refered from a forum / blog post or similar. Fortunately this can be easily resolved by adding  a custom filter in Google Analytics.  Please follow the instructions below to setup the filter.

1) Login to your Google Analytics profile and edit profile

Edit profile in Google Analytics

2) Add a custom filer.

Adding a custom filter in google analytics

3) Add custom Profile with the following settings.

Field A -> Extract A – Referral  (.*)

Field B -> Extract B – (Leave Blank)

Output To -> Constructor – User Defined $A1

Settings for the custom filter

4) To view the report go to Visitors –> User-defined

Sample of URL's showing full links

Unfortunately the filter will only apply to new traffic so it will show (not set) until new traffic data comes in.

Update: This Maintenance was completed successfully with less than 30 mins of Downtime.

On August 27, 2010, between 12:01am and 05:00am CST, our DC Operations team will perform a migration of servers located on racks bp14-32 in our Dllstx6 data center. During this maintenance, the servers will be gracefully shut down and placed on a new rack. Upon completion,  network connectivity and power will be restored. All IP addresses will be maintained.

While we’ve scheduled a five-hour maintenance window, we anticipate less than 60 minutes of downtime for each affected server. Our technicians have performed this maintenance several times in our other data centers and have established a process to minimize the outage period during the moves.

The following servers will be affected. Please note that portions of our control panel software is hosted on these servers so the control panel will be unavailable during the migration.

bp14a.02.dllstx6 (10.6.207.227) (Distribution Switch)

web-701A-ds-us.pairone.com (74.53.18.164)

web-701B-ds-us.pairone.com (74.53.18.165)

mail-702A-ds-us.pairone.com (74.53.18.166)

mysql-703A-ds-us.pairone.com (74.53.18.167)

hspc-704A-ds-us.pairone.com (74.53.18.168)

win-701A-ds-us.pairone.com (74.53.18.181)

Please contact us if you would like any further information